“The supply chain isn’t going just to Bangladesh. It’s going to Alabama and Georgia,” says David Michaels, who ran OSHA for the last seven years of the Obama administration. Safety at the Southern car factories themselves is generally good, he says. The situation is much worse at parts suppliers, where workers earn about 70¢ for every dollar earned by auto parts workers in Michigan, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. (Many plants in the North are unionized; only a few are in the South.)

Cordney Crutcher has known both environments. In 2013 he lost his left pinkie while operating a metal press at Matsu Alabama, a parts maker in Huntsville owned by Matcor-Matsu Group Inc. of Brampton, Ont. Crutcher was leaving work for the day when a supervisor summoned him to replace a slower worker on the line, because the plant had fallen 40 parts behind schedule for a shipment to Honda Motor Co. He’d already worked 12 hours, Crutcher says, and wanted to go home, “but he said they really needed me.” He was put on a press that had been acting up all day. It worked fine until he was 10 parts away from finishing, and then a cast-iron hole puncher failed to deploy. Crutcher didn’t realize it. Suddenly the puncher fired and snapped on his finger. “I saw my meat sticking out of the bottom of my glove,” he says.

Now Crutcher, 42, commutes an hour to the General Motors Co. assembly plant in Spring Hill, Tenn., where he’s a member of United Auto Workers. “They teach you the right way,” he says. “They don’t throw you to the wolves.” His pay rose from $12 an hour at Matsu to $18.21 at GM.

In 2014, OSHA’s Atlanta office, after detecting a high number of safety violations at the region’s parts suppliers, launched a crackdown. The agency cited one year, 2010, when workers in Alabama parts plants had a 50 percent higher rate of illness and injury than the U.S. auto parts industry as a whole. That gap has narrowed, but the incidence of traumatic injuries in Alabama’s auto parts plants remains 9 percent higher than in Michigan’s and 8 percent higher than in Ohio’s. In 2015 the chances of losing a finger or limb in an Alabama parts factory was double the amputation risk nationally for the industry, 65 percent higher than in Michigan and 33 percent above the rate in Ohio.

Korean-owned plants, which make up roughly a quarter of parts suppliers in Alabama, have the most safety violations in the state, accounting for 36 percent of all infractions and 52 percent of total fines, from 2012 to 2016. The U.S. is second, with 23 percent of violations and 17 percent of fines, and Germany is third, with 15 percent and 11 percent. But serious accidents occur in plants from all over, according to more than 3,000 pages of court documents and OSHA investigative files obtained under the Freedom of Information Act.

Some people will say that words like scum and rotten are wrong
for Objective Journalism — which is true, but they miss the
point. It was the built-in blind spots of the Objective rules and
dogma that allowed Nixon to slither into the White House in the
first place. He looked so good on paper that you could almost vote
for him sight unseen. He seemed so all-American, so much like
Horatio Alger, that he was able to slip through the cracks of
Objective Journalism. You had to get Subjective to see Nixon
clearly, and the shock of recognition was often painful.

There are a ton of awesome features hidden away in many Google apps that are rarely hyped up namely due to a lack of advertisement by Google. One such feature hidden away in Google Chrome’s chrome://flags page is the Scroll Anchoring feature.

Introduced back in April initially only in Google Chrome Dev v51 builds, the feature prevents your webpage from “jumping” whenever offscreen content such as ads or images are loading. I’m sure you’ve run into this issue before, it happens fairly frequently for any user who quickly jumps from one webpage to another, perhaps when reading articles with tons of images. Your only real solution to this is to patiently wait for the entire webpage to fully load before clicking on any link, but who has time for that?

Sufficiently bothered by this issue yet? If so, then head on over to chrome://flags/#enable-scroll-anchoring (paste this into your URL address bar), enable the flag, then relaunch the browser. After you’ve enabled this feature, you should no longer suffer from text reflows due to the loading of offscreen content, but as Google Chrome’s developers note your mileage may vary. If you do notice a webpage incorrectly reflow even after enabling this feature, you can report it straight to the developers by following this link.

It’s worth noting that Google may choose to can this feature whenever they want, as any feature that lives in the chrome://flags page is technically only for beta testing purposes. However, since this feature has already survived two version changes in Google Chrome Dev, we don’t expect it to suddenly disappear in the next week or so. As the stable build of Google Chrome is now on v51, all users of Chrome browser on Android can take advantage of this feature. We’re not exactly sure why this feature hasn’t been enabled by default in any build of Chrome, but my tinfoil hat tells me it’s so that you will accidentally click on advertisements.

I guess that after a few weeks in France, Nyarly just crossed the tunnel to enjoy some new tricks...Of course, this strip is an hommage to Charles Stross' line of novels about the Laundry,this British secret intelligence service, dedicated to fighting Unspeakable Horrors ...